Will Perilous Trek to Amazon Reveal Heart of Darkness?

Dr. Marina Singh, the 42-year-old research scientist who is the heroine of “State of Wonder,” Ann Patchett’s most far-flung yet somehow least exotic book, is in her office at a large pharmaceutical company in Minnesota when the bad news arrives. Marina does unremarkable research on cholesterol. She is having an unremarkable affair with Mr. Fox, the company’s C.E.O. The bland, far-from-fantastic Mr. Fox arrives to tell her that her research partner, Dr. Anders Eckman, has died of a fever in a remote part of Brazil.

In Marina’s reaction to this terrible news, which comes on only the book’s second page, Ms. Patchett gives a quick glimpse of how crystalline and exquisite her prose can be. Marina suddenly grasps why people faced with sudden shock are often advised to sit down. “There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding,” Ms. Patchett writes, “as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.”

In another show of artfulness Ms. Patchett has embedded many small hints about her much larger novel in this miniature scene. The letter announcing Anders’s death comes from Dr. Annick Swenson, a fierce if not exactly irreproachable figure. Swenson was a medical school professor of Marina’s and was so tough that she stopped Marina’s medical career in its tracks.

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Ann PatchettCredit
Melissa Ann Pinney

The repercussions of this calamitous event in Marina’s life have never ended. Now Swenson holes up in a remote outpost in the Amazonian jungle, where she is supposedly creating a new fertility drug that will be worth a fortune, one that will allow women to bear children even when they are very old. This could be, as Anders once said, “ ‘Lost Horizon’ for American ovaries.” What are the moral implications of such a discovery? Did this scientific experimentation drive Swenson mad — Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” mad or H. G. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau” mad? Marina is expected to go to the jungle and get the lay of that mysterious land.

So “State of Wonder” is headed for Brazil. But there are detours in its way. We learn that the half-Indian Marina is the child of a white mother and foreign graduate-student father who abandoned the family, a situation that “had become the stuff of presidential history.” This background left Marina with “all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wandered into their holiday dinner” and a general sense of being a misfit. We learn that Marina, who had to take anti-malarial medication to visit her father in Calcutta, is also plagued with drug-induced nightmares on her flight to Brazil. “Should I wake you up,” asks the man in the next seat, “or just let you go?”

The state of wonder in Ms. Patchett’s title kicks in as soon as the plane touches down. Or at least it can be found in small doses. When Marina arrives, she imagines that “every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction.” When she reaches the Amazonian city of Manaus and goes to the opera, Ms. Patchett delivers a homage to the film “Fitzcarraldo” and its director, Werner Herzog, the patron saint of all thrillingly ill-considered voyages into the unknown.

The book finally hits its jungle stride with long-toed birds, water foliage as thick as lettuce and, beneath its cover, an anaconda worse than anything that ever made Marina wake up screaming. There are tourists who embarrassingly mistake Marina for a very tall tribeswoman. And there is the ghostly, druggy vision of just how the women of the Lakashi tribe turn themselves into such medical miracles. Marina will discover that it is not just a love of knowledge but also a taste of tree bark that has kept the 73-year-old Swenson bound to her research for so many years.

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Patricia Wall/The New York Times

Not until Marina comes face to face with Swenson does this unexpectedly meandering novel find its focus. In books like “Bel Canto” and “Run” Ms. Patchett found amazing ways to coax unrelated elements into magically coherent narratives and make them all matter. But in this case, it is Swenson who is far and away the book’s best-realized character. And the reader drifts past many so-so secondary figures and generic tropical scenery before her presence is really felt.

When she does appear, so does this book’s central issue, its unresolved rivalry, its beating heart. And she is worth the wait. Here is the dragon of a teacher who lurks somewhere in every student’s academic history, and whose cruelty and exactitude are inseparable personality traits. “They have a real talent for breeding mosquitoes,” Swenson tells Marina about her current staff, with typical generosity, “and that is all the credit I will give them.”

It takes the sting of Swenson, the sci-fi edge of the drug research and the partial awakening of the once-timid Marina, who this time blossoms under her fearsome mentor’s influence, to jolt “State of Wonder” up to the level of Ms. Patchett’s usual work.

Perhaps the temptations of the Amazon are overwhelming for any writer with such a gift for animating her surroundings. Perhaps the shadow of “Heart of Darkness” is too long and the allusions to other works too thick on the ground. And “Lost Horizon” for American ovaries? Perhaps Ms. Patchett intends that as the jumping-off point for a moral argument. But it’s a little too loony to be taken seriously. And it’s a horror that would have given even Joseph “The horror! The horror!” Conrad pause.

STATE OF WONDER

By Ann Patchett

353 pages. Harper. $26.99.

A version of this review appears in print on June 2, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Will Perilous Trek To Amazon Reveal Heart of Darkness?. Today's Paper|Subscribe